I love college radio but couldn't find a decent way to listen online. Sure there's iTunes and shoutcast.com, but it can be hard to find actual college stations among everything tagged "college". And I don't like being restricted to their interfaces. And there's been a few times where I wanted to make a radio tuner application, either web-based or standalone, but got discouraged by having to do all the legwork. Thus goodradio.org was born: as an easy way to both listen to great college radio stations and build applications to listen to them.

Here's a google map plotting all the best college and non-commercial radio stations using the actual GPS coordinates of their transmitters as listed in the dreaded FCC database. Right-click a station (the tower icon, not the label) to stream it directly, or left-click to see a bubble with a bunch of info including studio phone number, online archives, homepage, etc., and zoom all the way in to see the tranmitter antenna.

The same stations as the map but plotted in a classic jukebox-style interface:

Here's a semi raw view of the database that contains all these stations. You can play stations from here too, or suggest stations to be added, or flag stations that need updating.

Or if you want to make an application that tunes into college and/or non-commercial radio, here's some stuff to get you started.

11/21/08: The site got a sprucing up.